Elon Green

Between the continued coverage of the immigration directive and the Greek vote, the speech Mitt Romney gave yesterday at Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition conference has gotten little attention. That’s too bad; there aren’t many opportunities to see Romney engage the most socially conservative wing of his party. Once the throat-clearing was over, Romney […]

Not long after the White House announced its bombshell immigration directive (Ed wrote about it here), Tara Wall, a Romney adviser, took to CNN and said: Within the party, there are plenty of opinions about this and I think there’s plenty of time to talk about how we address this. There’s no easy solution and […]

This morning, Mitt Romney passed along a conspiracy theory: “[President Obama] said that energy prices would skyrocket under his views and he selected three people to help him implement that program: the secretary of energy, the secretary of the interior, and the EPA administrator,” Romney said. “And this gas-hike trio has been doing the job […]

A couple of days ago, Roy Edroso noticed that conservative writers are irate, this time about the media’s coverage of Rick Santorum’s interest in pornography — which the candidate believes has brought about “a pandemic of harm” upon the nation. “Why is this suddenly coming up now?” asked a Hot Air blogger. “Did the media […]

The last time I subbed for Ed I wrote about a characteristically poor Maureen Dowd column. Since it’s Sunday, and political coverage seems, at least for the moment, relegated to Rick Santorum’s chest hair, I see no reason not to don the wetsuit and snorkel and dive back in. The hook for today’s offering is […]

Much attention was given to this week’s Fox News interview with Mitt Romney during which the candidate, as is his wont, performed poorly. His interviewer, Megyn Kelly, didn’t exactly go after him, but neither was the interview the lovefest to which Romney had probably become accustomed. Fox has actually been incredibly hospitable to the candidate, […]

This morning, Jonathan Adler, a contributing editor to The National Review Online, asks: Why is it that hardly anyone — not the media nor the other candidates — directly challenge Gingrich’s claim to have a conservative record? I’m going to gently suggest to Mr. Adler that the blame lies with his fellow conservatives, who until […]

Maureen Dowd does not read Talking Points Memo. Exhibit A is today’s column, in which she uses the confrontation between President Obama and Jan Brewer to support her thesis that Obama has a “penchant for getting in tangles with blond politicians on airport tarmacs.” Her evidence: On Wednesday, Obama had another bristly tarmac moment with […]

This morning brings some sad news, that Rick Santorum’s daughter, Bella, has been hospitalized in Philadelphia. The child has Trisomy 18, a particularly heartbreaking genetic condition. I do not share the opinion that it is distasteful to discuss the political issues surrounding a tragedy, that there should be some kind of grace period. If you […]

In politics, it’s awfully risky to write off or underestimate the relevance of a person or movement. After President Obama was elected, the CW was that the Republican Party would need to moderate itself or face marginalization. Even Paul Krugman, who has a better track record than anyone on earth, warned several weeks before Obama’s […]